Performing Nineteenth-Century Glasgow

In August 2025, the Mitchell Library hosted an exhibition of nineteenth-century theatrical materials, highlighting Glasgow’s vibrant and diverse performance culture in the Victorian era. The exhibition, ‘Performing Nineteenth-Century Glasgow: Nation, Celebrity, Empire,’ was curated by Deven Parker and Susan Taylor and funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

Along with showcasing rare and unique playbills, posters, and illustrations from the Mitchell’s Special Collections, the display featured materials from Glasgow University’s Scottish Theatre Archive, putting these two collections into conversation for the first time.

Viewers were given a firsthand glimpse of Victorian Glasgow’s lively, unexpected dramatic entertainments (including dogs and elephants on stage!), while children enjoyed a puppet theatre and a colouring activity using authentic Victorian toy theatre sheets. This blog will discuss some of the exhibition highlights. 

People of all social classes and backgrounds visited Glasgow’s stages, from the official Theatres Royal on Queen and Dunlop streets to the wooden ‘geggies,’ or penny theatres, on the Saltmarket. Shows were long, beginning around 6pm and ending around 11pm. Attendees could expect to see two to three plays, as well as dances, songs, acrobatic displays, and even animal acts. Audiences were not quiet and subdued as they are now—Glaswegian playgoers were known for being especially unruly as they spoke with the actors, threw fruit and bottles, and even interrupted plays they did not like.

Glasgow’s theatres were important sites for encountering and imagining distant peoples and places from across the British Empire. Plays featuring exoticised locales and people capitalised on audiences’ desires to visualise the empire and to make sense of Glasgow’s place within it. They included plays set in India, the Middle East, and Africa, as well as nationalistic re-enactments of wars fought abroad, such as the Anglo-Mysore wars in India (1767-1799) and Anglo-Afghan wars in Afghanistan (1838-1842). These plays regularly incorporated animal performers such as horses, dogs, lions, and monkeys. They also relied on racist stereotypes in their depictions of people of colour and helped to prop up belief in Britain’s cultural superiority as the centre of empire. 

Glasgow was a global theatrical hub in the nineteenth century. Celebrity actors such as Ira Aldridge, Edmund Kean, Pablo Fanque, and Sheridan Knowles made stops in the city on their global tours, delighting audiences in their most famous roles. The city also produced celebrities of its own, such as Charles Mackay, who became internationally renowned for bringing Scottish characters (and caricatures) to the rest of the world.

In the early nineteenth century, plays adapted from Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly novels led to the rise of a theatrical form called the ‘national drama.’ These were plays set in Scotland about Scottish historical figures, as well as legends and folktales. They were extremely popular with Glasgow audiences, who enjoyed seeing familiar stories performed by Scottish performers in their own languages and dialects. Some of these plays, especially Rob Roy, became popular across the nation.